To foster adoption of your tool it might make sense to provide all-in-one downloads. This makes sense if your product has dependencies on many different 3rd party plugins (and you e.g. need very specific versions) or you want to make it super easy for your users to start using your tool.

Since e(fx)clipse provides such downloads to its users many people who are not yet familiar with eclipse and want to give it a shot use the distros we are providing.

Until today those distros have been created through a shell script provided by Denis Hübner from itemis but because I’m not an bash guru, customizing it to my needs was a bit painful and so I decided to write my own very very simple distro builder using Java.

I have a quite similar solution in bash: https://github.com/ferstl/eclipse-builder
But instead of customizing the script for different distros, there are simple configuration files that look very similar to the parameters in your ANT target.

An interesting question, I’ve never thought about that. The problem is most likely that the native launcher searches for the config.ini in a special location which is not different between the different installs (at least Linux and Win have the same structure).